He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it.

Tennyson, a very typical nineteenth-century man, uttered one of the instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he said that there was faith in their honest doubt.

There was indeed.

Those words have a profound and even a horrible truth.

In their doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos.